YouSaid · the spoken record

Sri Batchu

lines on the record: 88
first: 2023-06-25
most recent: 2023-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I'm a big fan of the fun place with the Cesspool of Twitter. So I have a public Twitter account that you can DMV. My DMs are open. It's just my name Sri underscore Bachu. And in terms of listeners can be useful, honestly, I think I really enjoy like-minded folks. And as I may have mentioned in other places, RAMP is growing incredibly well and then we're constantly looking to hire and we're still hiring. So best in class, growth in marketing folks that they can recommend that we hire ramp. I'd love to hear.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on slope rather than intercept, I think we'll work well for you and like only hiring when people and teams are really stretched, right? I think this will serve you well both on cost and on impact. There'll be plenty of scope for the people that you hire. And as I said, I'm a big believer in small teams accomplishing more ramp being like a fraction of the size of some of our competitors with similar orders of revenue.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it seems obvious, and I think negotiations have already been the theme of this lightning round, but everything is negotiable when it comes to contracts. People think contracts are standardized for software, and usually not. People are trying to sell you something, they're trying to grow to, they have their quotas to meet, they have their goals to hit. And so, I mean, RAMP obviously has a service for this if you wanted to scale it to use ramps, but you can do this on your own, right? Always try to negotiate, be mindful of quarter ends for salespeople, right? And so if you can push something out to near the end of the quarter, you can ask for, hey, I'll sign it by the end of the month if you give me a 10% discount, we'll often work. So there's tips like that that you can do, but remember you can always negotiate. And then the second one is, I would say, is just higher slower. I'm a big believer, and Jeff talks about this too, in your other interview, like hiring.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is minor or not, but one of the things that, you know, on the growth side, we used to have separate sprinting for the product team, for the marketing teams, and each team had their own planning cycles. And one of the things that we did is we brought them all together into one. So the lifecycle markers joined the product activation team sprint cycles. And so their projects and work are very tightly aligned and work in the same pace and system as the rest of the product team. And that's had tremendous impact in our ability to work together.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I already mentioned eight sleep once in this call. I love my eight sleep. I'm a big fan and the ramp customers as well. And so that's been a great pandemic purchase. So I guess maybe not as recent. And then maybe another one is like fellow coffee, their kettles, or I think just design so beautifully. I don't drink coffee. I drink tea, but I use my fellow kettle for tea. And I think it's just a delightful product to use.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people actually struggle with that question and can't answer anything that they do that they're bad at, which is a little bit of a yellow flag, which means that they're only used to doing things that they're successful at and they haven't cultivated interests that are not correlated to their own success at doing something and they haven't taken the time to do that. And folks like that are going to run at the first sign of trouble and be like, oh, I'm not successful with this, so I'm going to move on. And what I really want to see is people that show examples of things that they're not successful at that they do for other motivations and goals and interests. And so if you can tell me a compelling story like that, usually a winning answer, so to speak.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both are acceptable answers. I was going to cheat on that one and say the one that you asked me right before because I think I've actually movies and TV shows and people rarely ask about that interviews like this. Favorite. Interview question that I'd like to ask candidates actually is what's something that you're really bad at but you still do and why?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is won the Oscar, but I really enjoyed everything everywhere all at once. I thought it was such a wonderful story. And it really, I think it's one of those, it's funny. The movie can also be, I think, everything because there are just so many different reads that you can get about that. It's about family. It's about immigration. It's about queer love. Like there's a lot of really interesting themes explored via one movie.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the core of the book is about listening behind the problem of negotiation and what is the person really asking for. So his example of like, you know, if you're always trying to split things evenly, you'll end up with one brown shoe, one black shoe where neither of you are happy. And so what is the, rather than thinking about Batna and Zopa and all the other business school frameworks on negotiation, I think focus on deep down, what does this other person want? And how can I change the conversation about that rather than the thing that we're, you know, arguing over?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tend to find most business books can be decks, but one that I really like actually is it's never split the difference by Chris Was. I found it super helpful for it's a negotiation book. Find it super helpful for negotiation, but also for a lot of business decision making generally, to be honest, and life. And then another, I'm a big fan of sci-fi short stories. So anything but Ted Chang or Ken Lu, I highly recommend.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also just more generally, give you and others confidence that you're being comprehensive in your solution development.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I mean, I'll give it really dumb example, but we'll make the point, hopefully. It's like, okay, Our profitability or our revenue growth has slowed down is the problem that you're trying to solve. And so, okay, like you start with, okay, what does this mean? Like you've got revenue per user has gone down or customer has gone down or number of customers have slowed down. Okay. That's step one of the Misi framework. Then it's like, okay, like where does the revenue come from? What are all the various products that revenue could be coming from? Has it changed on any of them? And then customers, why have customers gone down? Is it new customer acquisition? Is it activation of customers that have signed up? Is it retention? And just kind of breaking that problem. So at each layer, you've collectively exhausted all of the possible ways that this problem could have arrived. And just having that framework, whenever you approach every problem will prevent you from missing something.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll catch more potential solutions. And also, you'll feel comfortable that you've been comprehensive in your solution development. So anyway, just a little thing for people that are earlier in their careers to not forget.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how many people use this. I'm still surprised when new folks come to me and it's like I need to write, by the way, like a document of how do you work with me because I know it's like a lot of people have been talking about, I think Claire Beach Johnson's talked about it too. But I say that my love languages are like spreadsheets and frameworks. And one very simple one that I've always liked that sometimes people surprise to hear, but it's most consultants know is what we call Misi, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive side of things. So whenever you're trying to attack a problem and trying to brainstorm solutions or what have you, I really like to remind the teams to think about Misi because when you kind of think about that and evaluate your set of solutions with that framework in mind, I think you tend to find that you've”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On impact once they're there, and as well as managing out people directly that didn't work out. And I typically think it's like, you know, almost never when I've had to part ways with people is because someone's a bad actor. It's almost always that like, you know, it just wasn't the right fit for whatever reason, for their skill set, for their life goals, whatever it may be. And it just wasn't a fit for that role. And I think a lot of companies are hesitant to make those changes. And I think that's how they bring their talent bar down, frankly.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think of the talent density of your company as dependent on hiring. That's obviously true. It's an important part of the ecosystem. And the first part, but it's equally dependent on retention and performance management. A lot of companies can be good at hiring, but hiring has a pretty high rate of false positive. Like interview is the worst, best way to hire somebody, right? And then there's lots of ways you can make the interviewing process better, make it more interactive, make it more effective. But at the end of the day, you still don't know about someone until you really work closely with the new team, with the new mandate at your company. So I think it's not about necessarily hiring 10x operators. Obviously, you're looking for that, but it's also about investing in people that are doing really well and accelerating their growth and rewards.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one of them is the perception of performance and potential by the management team, right? And I think people need to be thinking about how to do that across more levels, which is if you can do that and if you do that well, I think you're able to differentiate the best talent and that'll be a great competitive advantage for companies that can do that well.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's a lot of conversation around compensation is very much focused on equality and narrowing the gap and bands for compensation. And I think personally, I know it's a bit of a spicy take maybe, but I think it's like the exact opposite direction of the conversation that companies should be having about compensation, which is I strongly, strongly believe that small teams of successful people can drive a lot more impact than larger teams and mediocre people. And so I strongly believe you have to design a system where you're able to reward 10x operators with 10x the comp. And I actually do think that you certainly see that at the executive level, right? So if you look at the same executive at different companies at similar stages, the comp can be wildly different for a variety of reasons.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both data is a lot of it is like somewhat public, right? So you can look up information on which companies might be doing well. So for example, I'll just pick like if you're looking for great email marketing folks like CRM Marketing Lead or something like that. You can actually look up on similar web, like what percentage of traffic shows up via email to companies' websites. So you've got your target list of companies that are one or two stage beyond you that you respect as general companies. And you can go and see, okay, which ones of these were actually really effective at driving web traffic or app traffic or app downloads via their email and then go try to source from those teams and companies. And I think people underutilize that even though it's very intuitive, right? It's just not something that occurs to people to do.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking for. So that's a very classic way of doing that, and I think that works really well for people and companies that are really well connected, right? And then, so there's another approach that I've actually used successfully is much more kind of data driven and kind of external and not as network-based, which is you can often look up”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google on Twitter has talked about some of this, which is like there's kind of two ways to go about hiring great people. One way is basically a very thoughtful and tactical network search where let's say you're hiring for a head of SEO, you go ask your network of who is the best SEO person you know get introduction to each of those folks and then ask them who the best person they know is and you have a mapping of where are the best SEO teams and why and if you can't get one of those people 20 30 people on your target list you kind of go down the list of okay like what is the next best person you typically want to limit it to companies that are one to two stages of growth after you so you want somebody that has seen you know your stage of growth and beyond at a company that has a reputation for craft in the field that you're”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our CEO has publicly talked about this. I think we as a company are very thoughtful about what we build in-house versus what we buy externally. I think a lot of engineering teams are often excited about building things in-house where there's off-the-shelf products that could basically work externally. And RAM has historically been good at not falling into that trap. And we use third-party tools for a lot of our growth and experimentation, for things that are not proprietary, strategic, et cetera. Obviously, some of the automation stuff that we've talked about, we've built all of that in-house in terms of prospecting, lead scoring and how we talk to our customers. But for the most part, we use external tools. Instacart and OpenDoor were not like that. We built our own internal experiment tracking systems and AB testing framework.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things that we've used, I mean, one simple thing is, you know, for sprint planning, actually, we use Airtable because the planning process and the scoring is so much more analytical and the translation layer. So we've got like a template on how we do our sprint planning and how we translate the various impact metrics into the common currency, which I enjoy. But I don't think it has to be our table. It's just some form of organization that works well for that. In terms of a very tactical growth tool that we've enjoyed recently is we use this company called Mutiny, which is also around customer, which is a tool for website copy personalization. They hook up with our third party data sources of you pay for. And based on what we know about the customer as they're landing on our page, we can personalize copy and design based on that. And that's material.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So that's why I think it's important to frame where this matters, right? And so I think I'm less worried about failing conclusively for things that are, you can fail really, really fast and just redo things like website conversion, email, et cetera. I'm more worried about that for things that take a while to plan and cost money, et cetera.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So there's always tradeoffs on this. And so, but what you're hoping is like you've done a complete refresh where you did all the things that you thought were intuitive that should work. And if it doesn't work, then you're like, okay, maybe my hypothesis is wrong. But you're right. There's always going to be a challenge if maybe the execution is wrong. And I did too many things potentially in that case.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I could change about this email in the same test is that the trigger of the email, is it the text content of the email? Is it additional personalization? Is it the design of the email? Trying to think of what are all of the various levers that you think could be wrong and put them all together to test your hypothesis of this touch point is wrong and how do I improve that?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the example there, right? And I think, for example, if you had the this kind of framework is more important for cross-functional larger scale bigger tests rather than an email modification, right? But we could even use it on a micro example, like an email modification, where you are like, okay, I think this particular email is underperforming because it's not talking to this part of the customer's pain point or journey or whatever. And you could just, the simplest test would be, okay, let me make some tweaks to the text and edit that. And that could be the end of that test. And if that doesn't work, you're like, oh, maybe those weren't the right text edits. Let me do different text edits or whatever. And that's fine. That's low cost. It's not the end of the world. And it's for you to be wrong there. But an alternative that you could do is like, oh, what are all of the things?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's really be thoughtful about the experiment design, both in terms of maximizing the number of people as well as maximizing the number of ways and types of ways that were effectively touching these target customers to show the value one way or the other.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, account based marketing is something that is very common in enterprise software, right, where you've selected certain customers that you think are high priority and you're saying, I want to touch them in as many nuanced ways possible to see if that drives conversion. And this is something I've seen tried many times where people do it, but they kind of do it halfway. where they're like, okay, try these three things, conversion of the control route wasn't higher. And so we think it's just not going to work. And then a new go-to-market executive comes and they have to do it again. They have to do it again. They have to do it again. It's like a very common one wherever this happens. And so when we did it at ramp, we did exactly what I just described, which is like.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always cost rationalize later if it works, right? And so maximize the treatment effect. And if with all of that, it didn't work, then you can say, hey, we're not going to try this again because we literally did try it. Everything that we could to test this hypothesis. And if it doesn't work in the best version and it's expensive as it is, this is not worth spending more time on. But if it does work, great, then you do another version of the test with like half the tactics or whichever tactics you think work better or worse and you optimize over time.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's because you haven't been able to design the test to fail conclusively. And it's hard to do, but at the end of the day, there's only two ways to make an experiment successful. Either you have a very large N or you have a very significant treatment, which is like what you're doing in the experiment itself. In B2B, you don't usually have the luxury of large M, which you do in consumer. Facebook can get stats, say, in two hours. A B2B company could take two years to get to the same number of touch points. And so to counteract that, I recommend people just trying to maximize the treatment effect, which is like, if you have a hypothesis that you're testing, just throw all of the possible tactics and resources that you think would move that needle.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talk a lot about that with my teams, both here and at other places, which is, A, like we celebrate failure. Growth experiments in my history are typically like 30%-ish success rate. So the vast majority of things that you try don't work. And so you want to create a culture where people aren't afraid to take risks and aren't afraid to fail. And for me, failure is not that you didn't drive revenue. Failure is not learning. Like, so it's really important that you learn when you fail. And so we celebrate failure as long as you're learning. And you can only learn if you designed the right test and you failed conclusively. Because otherwise, I think many of us have been in situations where there's intuition that something might work and it doesn't work. And then you end up doing it over and over for years. Because every time a new executor or somebody else has a same idea, you try it again.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're more scalable as well as you go farther along the list that I've described. And so that's the intention behind sequencing them that way. SEO is a bit unique. And the reason I recommend it later rather than earlier, even though it's not necessarily that expensive, is it just take some time to build. And without domain authority or backlinking or any media presence, you can end up just like flailing with SEO, creating content and not getting any actual traction for a long time. So there's like usually a good inflection point for your company to double down on SEO efforts. And it's somewhat a little bit later than some of the other channels.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, a lot depends on who your customers are, what your unique value propositions are, and how competitive the space that you're in. But I do think there's actually a general path that most B2B companies take and should take, frankly, which is my view is you start off with founder-led sales, like the early team needs to know how to actually sell. Then you hire your first couple of salespeople, then you start some very kind of low cost targeted marketing efforts. So whether it's like content, community, small scale events, and then PR. And after all of that is when you start paid and brand efforts. And then SEO probably started around the same time that you start paid marketing efforts. The reason for the progression the way I've described it is the channels get more expensive as you go farther along and they get more effective as you understand more about your customer.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so contribution margin is basically the profit that you make on a given customer after you take into account all of the variable costs. So including the cost of production as well as any other variable cost to serve that customer. So that might include support and other things that scale with your revenue. And then payback period is literally just how many months of that profit would it take to pay for, let's say, cost you $5,000 to acquire this customer and your estimated profit per month on the customer is $500, that is a 10-month payback period. So as I say that, I'm sure you've heard you still have to make assumptions for payback period, but at least they're more based in recency and you can evaluate them quickly.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard to predict LTV. It's like a DC app. It's extremely assumption laden and it's hard to know what the final value will be. And especially if you think your churn is low and your LTV is very high, you might end up spending a lot of money because you're like, oh, like my LTV cack is great. And then a year or two into the business, you realize, actually, your churn is higher than you thought your initial customers aren't representative of your long-term retention. And all of a sudden you've destroyed a lot of value by looking at LTBDCAC, which is why I'm like a big, big fan of payback period and actually being really thoughtful about that using contribution margin, not revenue or gross margin. Does it take to pay back their cost? And setting this obviously is typically a mandate from the executive and board level on what is the payback period that we're comfortable with.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a lot of people, CAC obviously gets thrown around a lot and a lot of people are like, okay, you have to be reducing your cap, there's a fundamental flaw to it, which obviously is that you're focusing on cost and not the value derived, right? And so when you focus on CAC and reducing CAC, what tends to happen is you actually might be doing something very damaging where you're succeeding in reducing CAC, but you're actually bringing in customers that are less valuable because those are the ones that you're able to attract with the lower CAC. And so reframing it away from CAC towards LTV is helpful and that's better, right? So thinking about, okay, like for better customers that are bigger, we want to spend more. So you might think, okay, well, LTV to CAC might be a better way of looking at that. I think the challenge with LTV to CAC, especially for a lot of, even RAMP, right, is only four years old is”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And it's very similar to, you know, we used to have this at Open Door and at the DoorDash also uses a similar framework, which is speed quality and cost. All three are important, but it's very hard to optimize all three at the same time. So you need to have a particular prioritization. And I think growth teams can also use that. It's like, okay, I think the way I think about the growth teams journey is step one is build a system that can move fast and then like work on improving the quality and then work on optimization of costs after. So similarly, you pick which phase you're on because you can't do all three at the same time, whether it's growth engagement, monetization, or just the other way of framing it.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was three orders in the first month and it ramped for our activation. We've got like, it's like very specific to ramp, but we've got like four events that the customer needs to do in the first 30 days. And if they do that, they have a high likelihood of being activated and successful. So our activation team focuses on that.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just depends on what goal at any given time is, right? Sometimes you're trying to drive more users. Sometimes you're trying to drive more engagement. And you can reorient the company on what you're trying to do as the North Star for growth during that period of time. And so users obviously we've talked about as a good one. For engagement, I think it's, I've often found what really helps is, and you've done actually really good benchmarking at some point, like the escape velocity metric for growth for a given company, I think. I don't think you phrased it that way, but that's probably that phrase for a given user, which is, you know, where does it take for somebody to become an engaged and active user or customer of a platform? And at Facebook, it was like, what, 10 friends the first seven days?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How that can impact and actually move the main metric. So it's usually like you have to find something that's somewhere in between, not too far, too lag towards revenue and value creation, but also not something that's actually translatable to the efforts of various teams.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding the right success metric, there usually should be two. There should be one on volume and another one on efficiency, and we can talk about what are good efficiency metrics and what are good volume metrics. On volume, I think the right success metric has a couple things that are important. One is there's a clear linkage to value creation for the business. So if I move this metric, that will drive revenue and which will drive equity value for the business or whatever it is that this particular metrics, right? And for Facebook, it was Mao. For Instacart, it was effectively monthly active orders. And it's something that we know is important that will really drive the value for the business. But it needs to have the other component of it, which is it's very intuitive for all the people working internally to the company. And it's also clear how if they're working on some minutia,”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, for anybody else that has that problem, they can just reach out to me. We'll figure it out. The reason we don't allow personal emails is because it's just typically very low in tech users that are coming to the website that are putting in personal emails.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, I know. And I'm glad you brought that up because we are obviously aware of it and we are working on something for users that have put in a personal email address. Oh my God. Charge of how to reengage that.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, like, I can tell you what we used to do in the recent past, we're evolving some things. But in the recent past, it was for the growth team, the North Star was dollars of SQL pipeline. So anything anybody did, we would try to estimate the impact into what would be the dollars of sales qualified lead pipeline generated for ramp. So if the website team wanted to change language on the cards landing page, their direct impact would be conversion rate, right, of email submission or something like that would be what they would be optimizing for. And then we would have, okay, what is two BIPs of conversion rate mean for dollars of SQL pipeline? A lot, or not a lot. And depending on that, it's like, all right, don't waste your time doing that project. Let's do something else instead. So that just helps us score and prioritize efforts.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends on the size of the company, right? I think this actually becomes much more important as companies get bigger because there's more teams to prioritize and more resources to cross allocate. And having a common currency makes that a lot easier. And so we do something similar at RAMP as well where we have translation factors for all of the various things that the teams are doing that translate back to the North Star for”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue boost whenever they want to kill it. That's Executive Agent was a conversation internally on like, should there be a permit rolled out? Should it be last year's experience? How should we think about, especially because it's such an important driver of modernization?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder actually, but there's holdout for almost everything. There's a holdout for ads, for example. So there are some lucky Instacart users out there that are not getting ads. And they've never gotten ads because they've always been part of Instacart's advertising.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And the other thing that we did is just, so we would have these translation factors, but we could also just see what the cumulative impact of all of the work is that Facebook did this too, which is just long-term holdouts, right, for each surface area. So the checkout experience team that I've been talking about a lot for some reason would have their own holdout. And so we can see what the cumulative impact of monthly active orders on the people that got last half's experience versus this half's experience on the holdout. And that would make it very clear. So regression is one way to do it, you know, and then basically effective A-B test, but it was a small holdout.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any number of things. It would be actually load time of the app on open. There's a team that's trying to make that faster and more efficient because we know that that impacts whether or not the person actually ends up ordering. If it takes five seconds to load versus two seconds to load. And so the full customer experience we're all segregated into different teams that were optimizing. So it's like, how long does it take to open? Okay. Number of searches that a user does on the app. We know that people, you know, and like number of items that are put into cart, like amount of time from cart to checkout, things like that. We literally just map out any user's journey throughout the app and have”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source